The Phony Campaign

2018-12-09 Update

This week, Hillary Clinton has dropped below our inclusion criterion (3%
or better nomination probability according to
Predictwise),
and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for some reason, has (barely) met it.
So: still 16 candidates, with a more bipartisan split: 9 donkeys, 7
elephants.
But President Trump widened his phony lead on the field this week:

Lots of 2020 news for New Hampshire, starting with the departure of 2018’s Summer Superstar, Michael Avenatti. The L.A. lawyer had an electric effect on the crowds at Democratic events in New Hampshire, and some longtime Granite State politicos had high praise for him.

Alas, we'll have to make do, for now, with more conventional pols.
And Trump.

If we could only somehow harness the renewable energy of millions of eyeballs
rolling skyward when reading Senator Gillibrand's tweets, our
climate change
problems would be solved. Among Lukas's tweet harvest:

Good to know. My girls will be excited about this. When is
it appropriate to let my boys (9, 7 and 6 years old) that
there's no future for them?

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

Maybe I like that because I've said the same damned thing hundreds
of times myself. (I'd like to know what
Sean Carroll
says about it though.)

Anyway, Andrew gets around to commenting on Senator Gillibrand's
tweet:

I get the point: Women are succeeding more than ever before, are
poised to do even better, and this is a great thing. But why express
this as if men are also not part of the future? And
“intersectional”? It’s telling that, in Democratic circles, this is
such a mainstream word now that she doesn’t have to explain it to
anyone.

Gillibrand’s evolution, of course, has been long in the works — and reveals, I’d say, where the Democrats are going. When Gillibrand was a member of Congress, she identified as a Blue Dog conservative Democrat. She once campaigned in defense of gun rights, was in favor of cracking down on illegal immigration, voted against the 2008 bank bailout, and opposed marriage equality. Fast-forward a decade and look at the change.

"Evolution" is, for our pols, a shorthand for "changing positions
to maximize electability".

I would wager that the senator not only feels that she doesn't have
to explain her use of "intersectional" to anyone, I bet she
couldn't explain it to anyone without sounding ridiculous.

The plan was straightforward: After years of being challenged by President Trump and others about a decades-old claim of Native American ancestry, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would take a DNA test to prove her stated family origins in the Cherokee and Delaware tribes.

But nearly two months after Ms. Warren released the test results and drew hostile reactions from prominent tribal leaders, the lingering cloud over her likely presidential campaign has only darkened. Conservatives have continued to ridicule her. More worrisome to supporters of Ms. Warren’s presidential ambitions, she has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands.

Apparently (according to the last link) it's standard Native American dogma to eschew genetic
tests. So the senator is in a tad of trouble from them, too.

President Donald Trump has famously ridiculed Sen. Elizabeth
Warren’s claims of Native American heritage. Perhaps more damaging
to the Massachusetts leftist as she considers running for the 2020
Democratic presidential nomination, many natural allies aren’t
buying her story either. But before Democrats reject her as a
potential leader of their party, they ought to consider the
alternatives. She is not the first and won’t be the last politician
to make phony autobiographical claims.

O’Rourke was born in prestige, lived a charmed life, raised in an upper-class lifestyle by people accustomed to power -- a sharp contrast to that of a mostly Mexican-American, hardscrabble city where workers still barely make ends meet...

In the backdrop of the city’s multicultural community, his father, Pat O’Rourke, a consummate politician, once explained why he nicknamed his son Beto: Nicknames are common in Mexico and along the border, and if he ever ran for office in El Paso, the odds of being elected in this mostly Mexican-American city were far greater with a name like Beto than Robert Francis O’Rourke.

We can only hope that this who's-phoniest issue gets brought up in debates.

Also like Trump, Biden has a famously loose relationship with the truth. When asked in Montana about the accusations of law-school plagiarism that helped derail his 1988 bid for the presidency, he said, “It all came out in the wash — I never did plagiarize, I never did — and it all was proven that that never happened.”

That, of course, was a brazen lie. Biden even admitted to his guilt at the
time. And even setting aside that particular incidence of
plagiarism, the sum of his conduct in 1988 speaks for itself. He
embarrassed himself over and over again during that campaign. He was
found to have blatantly stolen the stump speech of another
politician, British Labour-party leader Neil Kinnock, and to have
lifted passages from speeches by JFK, RFK, and Hubert Humphrey. He
was also found to have lied about his college grades and the degrees
he had earned while campaigning.

Tobin further notes that Biden is the "only likely Democratic
contender who is capable of competing with the president when it
comes to wild, exaggerated accusations and rhetorical excess."

Professional fact-checkers would have guaranteed job security if it
came down to Trump vs. Biden.

In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby dares to recommend that the
country
Break
the Iowa/New Hampshire duopoly. The criticisms are the ones
we've heard for years: Iowa and New Hampshire are too white, too
old, etc. And the rest of the country is shut out from participating
in the
inevitable winnowing of the field that happens after (and sometimes
before) the Iowa/NH action.

The problem being that his
recommended method…

Here’s a better system:

Every four years, the Republican and Democratic parties should hold a drawing to choose two different states to go to the head of the line. Limiting the drawing to, say, the 15 smallest states would preserve the traditional “retail” campaigning that voters and candidates prize in Iowa and New Hampshire. But — this is the crucial reform — the drawing should not take place until Jan. 1 of the presidential election year.

At least in New Hampshire, the Secretary of State is
empowered
to
set the primary date "7 days or more immediately preceding the date
on which any other state shall hold a similar election". So the "parties" can do whatever they want,
but they can't stop us from voting when the SoS says.

(Well, they could say: "we won't recognize the delegates from your
state at our conventions." But see how well that goes over.)

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